Testing AI for Transcribing Handwriting
My research often involves transcribing handwritten deeds, wills and other historical documents. It’s a painstaking task made even more difficult when documents and scanned images of documents have poor penmanship, are faded or damaged.
I’m finding artificial intelligence (AI) applications increasingly helpful in other areas. See especially the articles “Lafayette’s 1825 Visit to Northern Virginia” and “History of Virginia’s Culpeper Basin.” So I decided to test AI in transcribing a handwritten 1866 deed with Transkribus optical character recognition (OCR).
Transkribus is an online application that uses OCR and AI algorithms to transcribe handwritten characters into digital text. It faces the same challenges I do in dealing with faded, poorly written and otherwise difficult to read documents. Transkibus offers free credits to process a limited number of pages, and paid plans for higher use.